Housing Surge and Resurgence

The disparity fuels anxiety.

"Who can afford it?" asked Delva Dandridge, a crossing guard for the public elementary school next to the Townes of Hillsdale. Dandridge said she earns less than $20,000 a year and lives in Southeast.

D.C. officials insist their plans for more affordable housing and development can improve neighborhoods like Ward 8 without displacing residents.

"We don't want to create areas of the haves and have nots," Stanley Jackson, the District's deputy mayor for planning and economic development, told a recent meeting of Democrats in Ward 8, where he is a longtime resident. "Our goal is not to have people feel like they have to leave D.C. Our residents don't have to feel threatened with the newcomers and change."

Change is clearly what the D.C. government has in mind. No other part of the District has so much land ripe for development -- from riverfront property along the Anacostia to the former National Guard encampment of Camp Simms to more than 300 acres at St. Elizabeths Hospital -- and such ambitious ideas for what to do with it.

There are plans for new retail and commercial developments at St. Elizabeths, the Anacostia Metro, and the waterfront in both Southeast and Southwest. Among the proposals is a light rail system connecting Anacostia to downtown and a possible soccer stadium at Poplar Point on the banks of the river.

The Anacostia River has long been a symbolic dividing line in Washington, with residents on the eastern shore feeling that residents in Georgetown and Adams Morgan and Capitol Hill got the better of everything because D.C. leaders cared more about the whites who lived there.

The term "east of the river" seems to imply one homogenous place. But it includes two separate wards -- 7 and 8 -- that are home to about 130,000 people.

Many of them live in neighborhoods that have struggled with grinding poverty and crime since the late 1960s, when thousands of poor families were relocated to public housing there from other parts of the District, sending many black and white middle-class families fleeing to the suburbs. But the region is also home to stable, upper-middle-class communities like Penn Branch and Hillcrest, with houses as grand as any in the city.

The most recognizable community in Ward 8, and east of the river, is Anacostia. Its boundaries are amorphous, depending on who is asked, but generally extend from the intersection of Good Hope Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, with Alabama Avenue to the east and Suitland Parkway to the south.

The area's largest developer, Chris Smith, who has some 3,600 housing units east of the river, saw promise in some of the District's poorest areas as far back as 1990, when he decided to focus on building and renovating there. "It was seen as all that was wrong with the city," he said during a recent tour of the area. "We thought we could change the image."

The company's first project for sale, the Townhomes at Oxon Creek at Mississippi Avenue and 19th Street SE, sold out quickly in the mid-1990s. It attracted black residents who had moved out years earlier to Prince George's County in search of a calmer suburban life but also a large number of longtime residents of the ward who had always rented.